Sacramento Just Turned Off the Lights

I have spent thirty years chasing fraud in the financial services industry as a court-designated expert witness in federal and state courts. The first lesson you learn in that line of work is simple. Fraud does not survive in the light. Justice Louis Brandeis figured that out back in 1913, when he wrote that sunlight is the best of disinfectants and electric light the most efficient policeman. Sacramento just bought California’s fraudsters a very expensive set of blackout curtains.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2624 into law on August 22, a measure authored by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta of Oakland that expands the state’s Safe at Home program to shield the home addresses of immigration support services workers, employees, and volunteers. Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio nicknamed it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” after the independent journalist whose fraud investigations helped fuel the opposition campaign. The nickname stuck. So did the controversy.

The law does not take effect until October 1, 2027, and it carries fines ranging from $10,000 to $50,000, plus jail time for violators. Citizens who run afoul of it can also face civil suits and at least $4,000 in damages. That is a steep price for pointing a camera at a taxpayer-funded nonprofit and asking where the money went.

Gordon Gekko told us greed was the thing that clarified everything. He had it half right. What actually clarifies a fraud case, in my experience sitting across from plaintiffs and defendants in depositions and arbitrations, is information. Bank records, invoices, addresses, names on a lease. Take away the public’s ability to gather and publish that information, even when the target is a nonprofit living on grants and government contracts, and the people committing fraud get to sleep a little easier at night. I have built a career on the opposite premise: that the truth shows up in the paper trail, and somebody has to be willing to go get it.

I arrived in California in 1990, when the state still had two functioning political parties and a governor’s race that meant something. I have watched that competitive system collapse into single-party rule county by county ever since. A one-party legislature with no real opposition needs outside scrutiny more than most, not less, because there is no floor debate left to catch a bad bill before it becomes a bad law. Citizen journalists, however scruffy or however much they enjoy a viral moment, fill part of that gap. AB 2624 narrows it.

The statute’s defenders say it only targets people who post personal information with the intent to incite violence or threats, which sounds narrow until you are the citizen standing on a public sidewalk with a camera, guessing what a judge might later decide you intended. Even the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization with no partisan dog in this fight, flagged sections of the bill for skating past the Supreme Court’s true-threats standard. When a civil liberties group that spends its days defending professors and protesters on the left starts waving a yellow flag, conservatives are not the only ones who should be paying attention.

Surely immigration workers who face genuine threats and harassment deserve real protection, and nobody serious argues otherwise. Publishing someone’s home address with the intent to get them hurt is already illegal in California and should stay that way. But the state did not need a new statute layered with vague intent standards and steep civil exposure to punish conduct the penal code already covers. It needed the discipline to write a narrower bill, one that protects genuine victims of harassment without also chilling the guy filming a public building on a public street.

Nine members of Congress, led by California Representative James Gallagher, are now asking Attorney General Todd Blanche to challenge the law in federal court, and the Republican Study Committee has sent its own letter making the same request. Whether the Justice Department takes the case remains to be seen. The law does not bite until October 2027, which leaves a long runway for a federal court, or a wiser legislature, to fix what Sacramento broke.

George Orwell wrote that in a time of deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. California just made that act a little more expensive. Brandeis had the better instinct a century earlier. Corruption does not fear a strongly worded press release. It fears a light switch. Sacramento should turn the lights back on, and until it does, the rest of us should keep asking who is standing in the dark and why.